Summer With Monika (1952) was one of the great early Bergmans; a clear-eyed, unsentimental elegy to young love that made a star of Harriet Anderson. At the time some viewers found it hard to see beyond the daring splashes of on-screen nudity.

Dappled with the ghosts of A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night is surely Bergman's warmest, most purely enjoyable motion picture. A witty La Ronde of romantic misadventures, the film was the director's first international hit.

If 1957's The Seventh Seal remains the director's most iconic picture, its opening "Chess-with-Death" scene still stands as the archetypal Bergman moment. The film has since been parodied by everyone from Roger Corman and Woody Allen to Arnold Schwarzenegger and French and Saunders.

Shot in the same year as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries could hardly have been more different. This gentle, compassionate odyssey through Sweden starred silent-screen legend Victor Sjostrom as an aged professor making peace with his past.

Beautifully crafted and delicately harrowing, 1972's Cries and Whispers starred Harriet Andersson as the dying owner of a country house, and Liv Ullmann as her sister. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Sven Nykvist winning a deserved Oscar for his cinematography.

Originally conceived as a six-part TV mini-series, Scenes From a Marriage (1973) offers an unflinching portrait of marital discord. Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson cover themselves with glory in a claustrophobic acting masterclass.

Bergman won an Oscar for his last great film; the picture he conceived as his grand farewell to cinema. Fanny and Alexander (1982) is a semi-autobiographical family saga that plays out in a world of flamboyant actors, wicked stepfathers and unstable magicians. Inevitably, it's hard not to view the stubborn, over-imaginative Alexander as the director's surrogate.

The success of Saraband failed, however, to draw the now fiercely private Bergman back into public life. In later years he lived as a semi-recluse on the Swedish island of Faro. He confessed that he rarely revisited the great works of his career because he found them "too depressing".